Weathering the Storm
by NeverLetMeGo05
Summary: Only by weathering the greatest storms can we appreciate the most beautiful skies - Tyler Knott Gregson. Felicity lives her life through this quote now. She lost her husband to an accident while she was 6mo pregnant with their daughter & Oliver Queen has been there through it all. When her daughter falls deathly ill how will their relationship change after Oliver steps up his game?
**So, this is my first ever AU Arrow fic.. EVER! Honestly, I haven't written anything in a couple years and nothing that means as much to me as this story. Please leave a review and let me know what you think as to whether or not I should continue. This will be a slow burn OLICITY. Nothing will happen right away. Please be patient as I learn to navigate new waters and try to write a wonderful story for you all to enjoy! Without further ado I give you the Prologue of Weathering the Storm..**

"Nooooo" I wail as the doctor standing in front of me delivers the most devastating news I have ever heard. "What else can we do? There has to be something?" I all but whisper as I collapse to the floor.

"I'm sorry Felicity. We are doing everything we can, but the disease has progressed quickly and we need to find out why her levels are so high." She's looking at me with sympathy, but it doesn't help me the least little bit.

I'm wiping the tears as they fall, but they're falling too fast to keep up and I lower my hand feeling defeated. I look over at my precious daughter laying in the hospital crib looking completely peaceful, but I know she is anything but.

Dr. Graham lowers herself to my level and stares directly into my eyes. "We will do everything we can to save her. I promise you this." She says with conviction. "My team and I will be assembling a plan of attack and over the next couple of hours several doctors will be in and out of this room asking you to tell her story from start to finish. I need you to tell them every little detail. Without that we will not be able to give you the correct diagnosis."

I'm completely spent now. All I can do is nod my head and look back at my daughter. This precious, perfect little baby is my life and these doctors are telling me that they are not sure that she will survive. In a matter of hours my entire life has been turned upside down. I knew she was sick. Sicker than she ever had been, but I never would have imagined this.

"I will give you some time to process this. I'll be sending an infectious disease doctor in here shortly." She places her hand on my shoulder, in what I'm sure was meant to be a show of support, but it does nothing to calm my nerves.

"Thank you Dr. Graham." I give her a small smile and stand back up. "I'm sorry I'm such a mess."

"Don't apologize Felicity. This is a lot to take in. I understand." She gives me a small smile before turning to walk out of the room.

This whole experience is like an episode of House. I'm in a glass room surrounded by beeping monitors and more machines than I have ever seen in one place. My 18 month old daughter is lying motionless in a crib in the center of the room wearing a purple hospital gown that she wasn't wearing when she was life flighted from the last hospital. She has 3 separate 3 port IV's coming out of her little body. One in each arm and one in her foot. Medicine continuously pumping into her body in hopes of healing whatever is going on.

I lay my hand on her chest and just watch her breath. "Fight baby" I whisper. "Mommy needs you to stay with her." I'm trying my best not to completely break down, but this is getting harder and harder as the minutes progress. I'm here by myself waiting to find out if my daughter will live or die. It's surreal really. You never think something like this can happen to you, to your child, but here we are. The 3rd hospital in less than 2 weeks. No direct diagnosis and no plan to help her little body heal.

I don't know how long I stand there just watching her breath before I hear a knock on the glass window separating our room from the hallway. "Ms. Smoak?" The man in the long white lab coat asks as he walks in the room.

"Yes." I reply as he reaches over to right side of the glass door for the hand sanitizer.

"I am Dr. Brown. I am an infectious disease specialist" He tells me reaching out to shake my hand before walking over to my daughter. "This must be Rylee." He lowers the side of the bed and steps closer. "Can you tell me about when this started? From the very start of her first sign of sickness?" He's staring intently at her.

"Well this has been happening for about 2 weeks now. This is day 13 since she first started getting sick." I go on to tell him how we went on vacation and the day we arrived she woke up with a 106 fever and I rushed her to the emergency room. They told me she had a virus and we left. I noticed a rash starting around her groin and by the time we woke up the next day it was a full body rash and her fever still had not broken and we went back to the ER. I showed him the pictures I had taken of the rash so he would understand what I meant. "I ended up bring her to the pediatrician on day 5 and he immediately admitted her and told me she had the neuro virus."

"Did she have any other symptoms other than the rash and fever?" He asks me as he looks over her little body.

"She was very lethargic. She hasn't held her eyes open for more than a few seconds in 7 days. She has bright red eyes and her lips have been very dry. Her tongue looks swollen and red and she refused to eat or drink." I tell him as I watch his every move.

Dr. Brown is silent for a long time as he continues to exam her. He seems very interested in her eyes and her mouth. He keeps going back to get a closer look. He finally stands tall and turns to me. "I believe there will be a couple more people coming in to run some tests on her and once we have all the information we will be able to make a full diagnosis and begin to come up with a plan."

"Do you know what's going on with her Dr. Brown?" I ask, praying he gives me some answer that I desperately need.

"Right now I need some more information before I can make a full diagnosis." A very diplomatic answer. I nod in his direction and turn back to Rylee. If he is not going to give me any information then he can at least leave me to wallow alone with my daughter.

Over the next three hours five more doctors come in and out of her room, running test after test, and keeping an eye on her vitals. Not one person gave me any information on her or told me what was going on. I'm left to my own devices of trying to find out what's wrong and needless to say, Google is not the most informative tool when you have no idea what is actually happening.

I'm sitting on the floor next to her crib when I hear my phone go off across the room. I stand up and walk over towards the window with the couch sitting just underneath it, and retrieve my phone from my purse.

" _How is everything going? I'm starting to worry. –O"_

I can't help the smile that appears on my face. Oliver is the closest person to me in the world. He has been there for me through everything with my daughter from the start of the pregnancy to the end, and I'm pretty sure he loves her like his own. He treats her like she's the most precious person in the world to him, and that alone makes me love him. This man is a gift from the gods and if there is one person that I need more than anything right now, it's him.

Instead of texting him back I decide to call him. I sit down on the couch and dial his number trying my best to get comfortable on this scrap of furniture.

"Felicity!" He breathes into the phone, "I've been so worried. What is going on? How is she? Is everything ok?" He starts firing off question after question and I have to interrupt him in order to get him to calm down.

"Oliver!" It's not incredibly loud when I say it, but it's loud enough to interrupt him. He stops speaking and allows me to talk. "I'm not sure really. No one has told me much of anything." I sigh into the phone and look out the window. "Her first doctor, Dr. Graham, hasn't given me much hope." My words trail off as the tears begin to fall again.

"Felicity, you know medicine is always changing. Don't lose faith right now." He's trying to soothe me, but it only serves to further drive me into the dirt.

"I can't lose her." It's all but a whisper, but his sharp intake of breath lets me know he heard me.

"Don't you let yourself go there Felicity," He's reprimanding me now. "You are so much stronger than this. Rylee is so much stronger than this. If you don't help her fight then who will?" He asks me and he's right. I'm all she has right now. I have to fight with her. "Do I need to come up there?" He asks me. Honestly I would love for him to be here. After all, he is a nurse himself, but he needs to work.

I don't get the chance to answer him before Dr. Graham walks into the room. "We are about to have a meeting in the conference room about your daughter. We would like for you to join us so we can explain what is going on." She tells me.

"I have to go Oliver. They have a diagnosis." I'm suddenly scared out of my mind and in desperate need of comforting, but I don't have that. "I'll call you later." I try to hang up, but he won't let me.

"Don't you dare hang up on me," He says stubbornly. "Put me on speaker phone during this meeting. I need to hear what they are saying."

"Can I have a friend on the phone during this meeting?" I ask Dr. Graham. "He's a nurse. He'll be able to help me understand this better."

"Of course." She says softly "That's a great idea. Come, right this way." She holds her arm out and I follow.

She brings me to a small room with a few chairs surrounding the room and a large marker board on the wall directly in front of me. The words "KAWASAKI SYNDROME" are written in big black letters across the board. Suddenly I'm terrified.

"Oliver." I whisper in to the phone.

"Calm down Felicity. I'm right here. I'll be with you the whole time." He tells me. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I take a seat on the chair closest to the door I just walked in and Dr. Graham shuts the door behind her.

"Felicity," She starts as she tries to gain my attention. "Your daughter has Kawasaki Syndrome."

I'm struggling to process now. Kawasaki? Isn't that a motorcycle? How can my daughter have a disease that sounds like a motorcycle.

"What exactly is that?" I ask her in a small voice.

"The easiest way to describe it is that it's a disease that attacks the medium to small blood vessels in the body." I know I look like a deer in headlights as I try to process what she's saying because she stops talking for a minute to let me process. "I'm sorry. I don't understand" I tell her.

"The inflammation levels that we keep talking to you about?" She says it like a question and waits for me to nod my head in understanding before continuing. "Well they are a reaction to her vessels swelling, if you will."

"So how high were her levels?" Oliver asks from the phone.

"They were up to 39 when we last checked Mr.." She trails off.

"You can call me Oliver." He tells her. "So her levels are obviously very high, but what exactly is going on with her body right now? Have any tests been run to check her veins?" Thank heavens he is a nurse and knows what is going on. I'm completely confused and I'll need someone to break it down for me.

Dr. Graham looks at me sadly and I know she's about to drop a bomb. I brace for it, but there's nothing I can do to brace for what she just told me. "She has five large aneurysms right now in her Coronary Arteries." I hear Oliver let out a breath and start talking again, but I can't concentrate. My daughter has aneurysms. Everything I know about aneurysms leads to death. The tears begin to fall and my breathing becomes shallow.

"..right now we can't focus on her heart. We have to put it on the back burner until we get her calcium levels under control." I heard the end of the sentence from Dr. Graham and I'm sent into a deeper tail spin.

She needs her heart to live! How can they tell me that it needs to be put on the back burner because of calcium levels? I thought calcium was good for you? I don't even realize I'm sobbing until Dr. Graham comes and sits beside me and begins to rub my back.

"Felicity I need to be frank with you. Right now your daughter has the highest calcium levels I have ever seen. We will be continuously be running tests to find out why they are so high and we will treat it with the best medicines available to us, but if we can not get her levels to drastically drop then I'm afraid she won't survive this." There it is. The other shoe has dropped. I'm wailing. Big, fat, crocodile tears are falling from my eyes now. My daughter may die. She is 18 months old. She has a whole life ahead of her. Why? Why her?!

"Felicity I need you to try to calm down. I know this is a lot to take it and it's very hard to hear, but we need you to be strong for Rylee. She is going to draw her strength from you. You have to be strong for her." She's rubbing my back trying to soothe me, but how can I calm down when I was just told that I may not be able to leave this hospital with my daughter. This is supposed to be the best hospital in Georgia. They have to fix her!

"Felicity?" I sigh. "Please try to calm down sweetheart," Oliver says. "I'm coming up there right now. Please stay strong until I get there." He's pleading with me. I can hear it, but I just can't seem to focus on anything, but the words "She may not make it." My mind is running all sorts of scenarios that I thought could happen and not one time did I think it was this bad.

My body is on autopilot as I walk out of the room and back to my daughter. I want so badly to hold her, to hug her, to never let her go, but I can't. She's trapped in this bed covered in wires and all I can do is look at her. My tears have not stopped falling and my head is throbbing now. I'm staring at this perfect little girl. This sweet, innocent, perfect person that I created, is fighting a battle within her body that no one can see.

She looks so peaceful right now. More peaceful than she has looked in a long time. I'm not sure what medications they are giving her, but whatever it is its working. I run my fingers through her hair and a small smile appears under her pacifier. "I'm going to fight this with you baby girl. I will be here through it all." I tell her. "I swear to you, that I will never stop fighting, but you need to promise me that you will fight too. We will beat this." The conviction in my voice is welcome. Whether I believe it fully or not has yet to be determined, but together she and I will beat this. We have to.

 **Soooo how was it? Did you like it? Please drop me a line and let me know if you did. The story of the child is so very true. My own daughter had this disease when she was 18 months old and everything that I have written about her is exactly what she went through. She's 4 now I've been going back and forth about writing about it for a while and I just sat down and decided I wanted to throw in her story and wrap it around a love story. I really hope you all enjoyed it. Please let me know if it's worth continuing!**


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